Low pay and extremely out of touch upper management (including team leads, supervisors, project managers, vice presidents, etc.). You’re expected to handle 100% of your own workload and about 50% of your manager’s. Most leads and managers are barely out of high school or still in university, so if you step into a lead position, be prepared to be surrounded by incompetent people whose only real goal is ego farming and blindly delegating useless, repetitive tasks handed down from upper management. This is all done so the company can look somewhat functional to investors and customers at first glance (and yes, this is coming from a young person as well).
You’re paid the bare minimum no matter what you do unless upper management decides you’re “productive” (which usually means either a burnt out 25 year old or a 40 year old delegation warrior), or unless they see you as an object of desire (hope that makes sense). I personally get paid around 500 euros less than all of the first-line workers I manage, while being on the verge of burnout from working with brain-washed corporate corpses whose entire vocabulary consists of: “use AI,” “engage the team of junkie teenagers so we can take some smiling photos,” “use AI,” “I’m delegating this senior-level task to you without any explanation and will put you on a PIP if you fail,” “use AI,” “your team’s KPIs dropped 1% last month, so take this four-hour useless training and raise standards for a €10/hour job,” USE AI.
On top of that, you deal with incompetent teenagers who are only there because their parents forced them to work. If you desperately need to grow in a role, this is probably one of the easiest places to do it especially if you don’t have the brain capacity of an inbred and have at least a few traits that make you approachable. Other than that, don’t waste your time. :)